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A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews

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Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews

#81

Post by mlboss »

jboy55 wrote: post #44

Its interesting how many of these companies have 'take home' challenges or projects. Even though the companies may say, "This should only take an hour", 99% of the time, it occupies my entire night/weekend, if not in coding but in thought. There's always something more you could do. Its presented as an objective test, but its very subjective, just as much as the whiteboard test. With the whiteboard test, as a candida…

And sometimes after you have spent so much time on take home exercise companies don’t even respond back.

Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews

#82

Post by jboy55 »

cortesoft wrote: post #77
jboy55 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole bent against white board questions is that they are unrealistic as to actual working conditions and thus are artificial. So if you are a successful engineer, using your work time efficiently, and yet, you have family obligations that prevent you from spending enough time as someone else on a take home challenge, is the take home challenge showing realistic 'working conditions'? Or is it a measure of freetim…

Couldn't you use the time that you would have been doing the whiteboard interview to do the take home work? If you have time to go to an interview in the middle of the day, you should have time in the middle of the day to do a take home project.

A take home test rarely means there is no in person interview. You will still get 'soft' questions from managers, product managers etc for half a day.

Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews

#83

Post by faitswulff »

As a candidate, here's what I like about white boarding, and conversely what I dislike about take-home problems: at least with whiteboarding I'm guaranteed to be wasting the employer's time and not just my own. I've spent hours completing a code challenge only to be rejected with no explanation in the past.

Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews

#84

Post by jboy55 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #72
jboy55 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole bent against white board questions is that they are unrealistic as to actual working conditions and thus are artificial. So if you are a successful engineer, using your work time efficiently, and yet, you have family obligations that prevent you from spending enough time as someone else on a take home challenge, is the take home challenge showing realistic 'working conditions'? Or is it a measure of freetim…

The vast majority of jobs I've worked at have required some flexibility in working off hours. Whether it was something that went down at off hours that needed to be addressed, or an unforeseen (and unforseeable) change in a business that required a last minute scramble, these things happen. True, there may be some jobs that are truly 9-5, and if that's the case, so be it. But frankly, as someone who is willing to put…

If 'Work Hours' require someone to be oncall 24/7, you can ask that as part of your interview, but you can't infer that from other factors.

Yes: "Our job requires you to be on-call 24/7, one week a month, can you commit to that?".

No: "You said you didn't have time for the take home test because you have a family. The family will get in the way of 24/7 support"

Also yes: "you will be traveling 5 days a week for your sales job, can you do this?" No. "We don't hire people with families for this job."

And, there's no discrimination towards you putting more time into your work. That's quite a stretch, if all you have going for you is your ability to put in more that 60 hours a week, that's not saying much.

Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews

#85

Post by Grue3 »

A list of companies to avoid for sure.

Take home challenges are terrible. The worst I had was the following. I was given the following prompt (translated into English):

"Please write a line-by-line sort of a large text file that doesn't fit into memory. To test the functionality also write a generator of such files [...]. Programming language doesn't matter. It is recommended to spend no more than 4 hours on this task"

I quickly whipped up a solution (in like 1.5 hours) based that you can see here [1] and sent it in. Obviously not "production-ready" solution, but it uses the optimal algorithm and satisfies the sparse requirements that were given. It didn't get accepted and the feedback was:

* the solution doesn't work with very long lines because CHUNK_SIZE is constant

* the solution stores the name of each chunk which technically makes it O(n_lines) in space (though the constant is very small)

Both of these are really uncharitable nitpicks, since the algorithm could be trivially adjusted to take these into account were it a whiteboard interview.

And people are complaining about having to invert a binary tree? Get a grip.

[1] https://gist.github.com/tshatrov/3c862eced64b25dd4256c02e985...

Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews

#86

Post by thomascgalvin »

yters wrote: post #51
jboy55 wrote: post #44

Its interesting how many of these companies have 'take home' challenges or projects. Even though the companies may say, "This should only take an hour", 99% of the time, it occupies my entire night/weekend, if not in coding but in thought. There's always something more you could do. Its presented as an objective test, but its very subjective, just as much as the whiteboard test. With the whiteboard test, as a candida…

Yes, I've interviewed at companies that have interview type puzzles and coding, and take home tests. I greatly prefer the former regarding time use. And, knowing the basic CS algorithms and data structures seems to be a good thing, since they make solving problems easier and lead to cleaner solutions. There's a reason they are considered the fundamentals in CS, even if they are baked into most languages nowadays.

> There's a reason [basic CS algorithms and data structures] are considered the fundamentals in CS, even if they are baked into most languages nowadays.

A linked list is such a fundamental piece of technology, and so obvious to anyone that's been working in a language for a while, that I feel it's perfectly acceptable to rule out a candidate who cannot write one.

It doesn't have to be perfect, and it doesn't have to have all of the optimizations and utility methods that you find in the standard libraries, but the ability to understand and work with a node that has a value and a pointer to the next node is kind of bare-minimum competency, isn't it?

Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews

#87

Post by rhinoceraptor »

mykowebhn wrote: post #3

Some companies list a take-home assignment as an alternative. IMO, that's worse than a whiteboard interview. My time is valuable, and I don't want to spend my evenings or weekends on an assignment.

I think take home assignments could be done well, but I've never seen it happen. You often need to spend time setting up which is a total waste of time for a throwaway project.

You should provide the candidates with a starter project in their language of choice, already set up and ready for them to start working. And you should give everyone at least some time limit (maybe one or two hours at most) so everyone is on equal footing.

And the worst part is, all the take home assignments I've done are just used as an initial filter, not as a final check in the interview process. I'd have maybe one phone conversation beforehand, spend hours working on the take-home, and then get a short rejection email with no useful feedback.

Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews

#88

Post by jjav »

softwaredoug wrote: post #46
pmiller2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people just can't ... think on their feet under pressure. It was good at finding that. What was the relevance of finding that? Do you always do system design under a strict clock at your company?

Well it’s certainly relevant if the job requires a lot of thinking on your feet. Like consulting and solutioning with clients under pressure... None of these interview practices are by themselves good or bad, it depends on what the actual job will demand.

When I worked as an independent consultant I'd get clients who needed fast turnaround on designing new feature architecture to a product I had not seen before, which is the closest analogy to the interview whiteboard design that I've experienced.

Even then, it's completely different. I'll first spend a couple hours with someone senior who can fill me in on all the relevant context. The dynamic is different because they need my help and are paying for it so they are highly motivated to give me all the context I need to help them. Only after that we go to the step where I whiteboard a few proposals and then we collaboratively decide which way to go. I'm quite good at this.

Interview whiteboard design is a different skill entirely, one which I don't believe has any relevance to job performance. Might be a good way to hire improv theater actors, but not engineers. Having to go from zero to solution in 45 minutes or less is not how it works in the real world. And doing so while being nitpicked by an interviewer more interested in showing off doesn't help. Instead of collaborating, the interviewer is there to grudgingly drop the occasional hint and then count it against you.

Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews

#89

Post by IshKebab »

mtkd wrote: post #30
pmiller2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people just can't ... think on their feet under pressure. It was good at finding that. What was the relevance of finding that? Do you always do system design under a strict clock at your company?

In my experience some of the biggest problems are solved best by the slowest thinkers Those slow thinkers might have a good idea of the answer they likely want to give straight away - but maybe want to take another day or two before committing Short meetings around a table can be quite frustrating for people that think slow - which is why many discussions can reach a better conclusion using email and time

That hasn't been my experience at all. The opposite in fact.

Sure the biggest problems aren't solved in 5 minutes at a whiteboard, but they are solved by people who are able to think on their feet at a whiteboard discussion.

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